Truffaut!

#4: Small Change (L'argent de poche)


This 1976 François Truffaut film centers on the children, mostly boys, in Thiers during the final weeks of the school year. As in his earlier film, The 400 Blows (1959), Truffaut creates a world almost wholly from the boys' point of view as they wander from adventures to boredom and back. Adults are depicted as loving, demanding, and largely incomprehensible creatures who exist only in their relationship to the boys themselves.

The film covers similar ground to that of The 400 Blows but these children of 1970's France must have been enigmas to Truffaut. Unlike the intensely personal and painful characterizations in The 400 Blows, the kids here are seen from a distance. The experience of this film is much more observational and less affective than the earlier film. In fact, much of the film carries a documentary, nearly home movie, vibe wherein the camera simply observes kids doing normal kid things with no direction, narrative arc, or any of the tropes normally associated with dramatic film.

Which is not to suggest that this film does not have its own charm. Compared to his earlier flick, there is more variety in the experiences of childhood depicted here along with a fairly didactic message that the larger civil and political society is capable of, and obligated to, ameliorate the personal and private failings of individuals in their relations to their children. Children may be neglected but they are not left to fend for themselves in a world of indifferent and self absorbed adults. In Small Change children enjoy the warm embrace of a benign and involved community. This difference may more than anything else simply reflect the difference in how childhood feels as a child and how it looks from the vantage of adulthood.

If the neglected boy in this film were to create an autobiographical film of his childhood 10 years later, I suspect it would look more like The 400 Blows than Small Change.

The audience in this film was fascinating as well. There is a long scene where a slightly distracted single mother leaves her toddler alone while she retraces her steps into the village looking for her lost wallet. The preternaturally adorable child follows a similarly adorable kitten onto the ledge of an open window. From there Truffaut largely plays the tension for laughs--will the kitten fall? will the child fall?--as the neighbors gather below grousing about the negligent mother. Ultimately the child does fall, bounces, and toddles away unharmed. The lesson is that children are more resilient than we think. Needless to say this humor did not play as intended.

I liked this film, although I liked The 400 Blows better. It wanders without much direction, it is close, intimate, and episodic. Nothing explodes. The French are apparently indifferent about what happens to their baguettes before they are eaten.